Stump County: Almost in the 20th Century

Well, the local politicians just took out a big loan of something like 800 dollars to stimulate the Stump County economy. Based on the theory that, “Those brats can’t vote,” they set it up so our kids (and our kid’s kids) will have to pay it back.

We were all pretty excited. They said they were going to help everybody but they used all of it on their pet projects and to buy votes in the next election.

Then they came up with a new idea. They borrowed another 800 dollars and set up a program called SPIT to help Stupid People in Trouble. If you bought a house you can’t afford, SPIT will help. If you have been buying toys instead of paying your mortgage, SPIT will help. If your financial problems are self-inflicted, SPIT WILL help.

If you have been working hard and doing without unnecessary things like food so you can keep your mortgage paid, you can’t get SPIT.

They tell us they know it is a good idea because all those smart folks in Washing Town are doing the same thing. The only difference is they call theirs TARP. Sounds like a good name to us. Here in Stump County, we use lots of tarps to cover up and hide anything we don’t want everyone to see. Lo Quacious, who is the only guy in the county to ever travel anywhere (and who loves to talk about it), says he thinks TARP stands for Taxing All Responsible People.

The Stump County Livestock market in Klenix crashed earlier this week. The investigators (meaning the loafers who sit in front of the Red Mule) say the heavy load of snow on the roof caused the support poles to collapse.

Lo says the same thing happened in New York. He thinks all of the manure buildup underneath damaged the integrity of an apparently solid structure. He says any fool could have dug just a little and would have seen the foundations of both were rotten.

Cletus and Clarence in Snakes Ranch are having a big fight. They had heard about big shots making buckets full of money speculating in stock. They each had ten dollars. Cletus bought a goat and Clarence bought a three-legged sheep and a shoat.

Wednesday they met at the Yak-n-Snack restaurant and Clarence bought Cletus’s goat for twenty bucks and Cletus bought the sheep and the shoat for twenty. They each made ten dollars that week which is more than they earn working.

They met every Wednesday at the Yak-n-Snack and each bought the other’s stock for twice the price of the previous week. They weren’t using real money, just IOU’s but they were getting rich fast. In a month that ten-dollar investment was up to $160. Another month and they were each worth 2560 dollars. That stock value just kept climbing and before the end of six months that sheep, shoat and goat were each worth over one million U.S. dollars.

Last week, Clarence had the goat pastured beside the big bluff overlooking Turkey Egg Creek. Well, that old goat slipped and I guess you could say that stock took a nosedive and ended up somewhere south. The sheep died too and went belly up and Cletus heard the Gov’mit was going to eliminate pork so he butchered the shoat and cured the hams and bacon.

Then the fight started. Clarence says he should get half of the pig and Cletus says he owned it that week and he could do anything he wanted with it.

The big question the rest of us have is, did they each lose ten dollars or a million?